Social relevance enhances memory for impressions in older adults

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults have difficulty retrieving contextual material over items alone. Recent research suggests this deficit can be reduced by adding emotional context, allowing for the possibility that memory for social impressions may show less age-related decline than memory for other types of contextual information. Two studies investigated how orienting to social or self-relevant aspects of information contributed to the learning and retrieval of impressions in young and older adults. Participants encoded impressions of others in conditions varying in the use of self-reference (Experiment 1) and interpersonal meaningfulness (Experiment 2), and completed memory tasks requiring the retrieval of specific traits. For both experiments, age groups remembered similar numbers of impressions. In Experiment 1 using more self-relevant encoding contexts increased memory for impressions over orienting to stimuli in a non-social way, regardless of age. In Experiment 2 older adults had enhanced memory for impressions presented in an interpersonally meaningful relative to a personally irrelevant way, whereas young adults were unaffected by this manipulation. The results provide evidence that increasing social relevance ameliorates age differences in memory for impressions, and enhances older adults’ ability to successfully retrieve contextual information.     

Social relevance enhances memory for impressions in older adults

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults have difficulty retrieving contextual material over items alone. Recent research suggests this deficit can be reduced by adding emotional context, allowing for the possibility that memory for social impressions may show less age-related decline than memory for other types of contextual information. Two studies investigated how orienting to social or self-relevant aspects of information contributed to the learning and retrieval of impressions in young and older adults. Participants encoded impressions of others in conditions varying in the use of self-reference (Experiment 1) and interpersonal meaningfulness (Experiment 2), and completed memory tasks requiring the retrieval of specific traits. For both experiments, age groups remembered similar numbers of impressions. In Experiment 1 using more self-relevant encoding contexts increased memory for impressions over orienting to stimuli in a non-social way, regardless of age. In Experiment 2 older adults had enhanced memory for impressions presented in an interpersonally meaningful relative to a personally irrelevant way, whereas young adults were unaffected by this manipulation. The results provide evidence that increasing social relevance ameliorates age differences in memory for impressions, and enhances older adults' ability to successfully retrieve contextual information.     

Memory prediction accuracy in younger and older adults: a cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis

Across three experiments, the effects of age and normative information on memory prediction accuracy were examined. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults were given an arbitrary midpoint anchor and made global predictions about how they expected to perform on subsequent verbal, visual, and name-face memory tasks. In Experiment 2, the normative information was varied by providing participants with a midpoint anchor, accurate anchor, or no anchor. Across both experiments, older adults successfully adjusted their predictions in accordance with the task demands, regardless of the type of normative information given. In Experiment 3, older adults' prediction accuracy was measured at a 5-year follow-up. Memory performance predictions were found to be just as accurate as they had been at the first assessment. In general, the findings indicate that older adults were as accurate as younger adults in assessing their memory performance abilities. Older adults also did not operate on a negative stereotype of global cognitive decline with age, as they provided varying performance estimates across the different domains and types of memory tasks.     

Effects of Domain,Retention Interval,and Information Load on Young and Older Adults’ Visuospatial Working Memory

Age-related differences in visuospatial working memory were examined in 69 young adults and 49 older adults exposed to three pairs of tasks. Each pair consisted of one task involving information about the form or appearance of items and another task involving information about item locations. The first pair of tasks manipulated retention interval and required maintaining information about one item. The second pair also manipulated retention interval and required maintaining information about multiple items presented simultaneously. The third pair manipulated the number of sequentially presented items. Analyses of the first two pairs of tasks revealed significant age deficits in working memory for spatial locations but not in working memory for visual features. Notably, there were no age differences in the effect of retention interval on any of the four tasks, suggesting that visuospatial information is lost at similar rates in older and young adults. Analyses of the third pair of tasks revealed that, regardless of domain, increasing the amount of information impaired older adults’ memory performance to a greater extent than young adults’ performance. Thus, the present results suggest differences in basic working memory capacity in both domains, but a lack of age differences in rates of forgetting from working memory, and greater age-related deficits in the spatial domain than in the object domain.     

Age differences in response selection for pure and mixed stimulus-response mappings and tasks

Two experiments examined effects of mixed stimulus-response mappings and tasks for older and younger adults. In Experiment 1, participants performed two-choice spatial reaction tasks with blocks of pure and mixed compatible and incompatible mappings. In Experiment 2, a compatible or incompatible mapping was mixed with a Simon task for which the mapping of stimulus color to location was relevant and stimulus location was irrelevant. In both experiments, older adults showed larger mixing costs than younger adults and larger compatibility effects, with the differences particularly pronounced in Experiment 1 when location mappings were mixed. In mixed conditions, when stimulus location was relevant, older adults benefited more than younger adults from complete repetition of the task and stimulus from the preceding trial. When stimulus location was irrelevant, the benefit of complete repetition did not differ reliably between age groups. The results suggest that the age-related deficit associated with mixing mappings and tasks is primarily due to older adults having more difficulty separating task sets that activate conflicting response codes.     

Aging, imagery, and the bizarreness effect

ABSTRACT This study examined the bizarre imagery effect in young and older adults, under incidental and intentional conditions. Intentionality was manipulated across experiments, with participants receiving an incidental free recall test in Experiment 1 and an intentional test in Experiment 2. This study also examined the relation between working memory resources and the bizarreness effect. In Experiment 1 young and older adults were presented with common and bizarre sentences; they later received an incidental recall test. There were no age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect in Experiment 1 when ANOVAs were used to analyze the data. However, when the bizarreness effect was examined in terms of effect size, there was evidence that younger adults produced larger bizarreness effect sizes than younger adults. Experiment 2 further explored age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect by presenting young and older adults with bizarre and common sentences under intentional learning conditions. Experiment 2 failed to yield age differences as a function of item type (bizarre vs. common). In addition, Experiment 2 failed to yield significant evidence that the bizarreness effect is modulated by working memory resources. The results of this study are most consistent with the distinctiveness account of the bizarreness effect.     

Effects of aging and task difficulty on divided attention performance

We report two experiments that compare the performance of young and older adults on perceptual-motor tasks involving division of attention. Previous studies have shown older people to be especially penalized by divided attention situations, but the generality of this finding was recently challenged by Somberg and Salthouse (1982). The present study was conducted to investigate the possibility that age differences in dual-task performance are amplified by an increase in the difficulty of the constituent tasks, where difficulty was manipulated by varying the central, cognitive nature of the tasks (Experiment 1) or the degree of choice involved (Experiment 2). With the present tasks, strong evidence was found for an age-related decrement in divided attention performance. Contrary to our original expectations, however, it does not seem that division of attention presents some especial difficulty to older people. Rather, division of attention is one of several equivalent ways to increase overall task complexity. In turn, age differences are exaggerated as tasks are made more complex.     

Aging,imagery, and the bizarreness effect

ABSTRACT

This study examined the bizarre imagery effect in young and older adults, under incidental and intentional conditions. Intentionality was manipulated across experiments, with participants receiving an incidental free recall test in Experiment 1 and an intentional test in Experiment 2. This study also examined the relation between working memory resources and the bizarreness effect. In Experiment 1 young and older adults were presented with common and bizarre sentences; they later received an incidental recall test. There were no age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect in Experiment 1 when ANOVAs were used to analyze the data. However, when the bizarreness effect was examined in terms of effect size, there was evidence that younger adults produced larger bizarreness effect sizes than younger adults. Experiment 2 further explored age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect by presenting young and older adults with bizarre and common sentences under intentional learning conditions. Experiment 2 failed to yield age differences as a function of item type (bizarre vs. common). In addition, Experiment 2 failed to yield significant evidence that the bizarreness effect is modulated by working memory resources. The results of this study are most consistent with the distinctiveness account of the bizarreness effect.     

Aging and Source Monitoring of Characters in Literary Texts

This research examines adult age differences in source monitoring for literary texts. Source monitoring refers to processes that lead to attributions regarding the source or origin of information (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). Young and older adults read a literary play (Experiment 1) or short story (Experiment 2). In a later source-monitoring test, participants decided whether statements originated from Character A, Character B, Character C, or none of them. Recognition memory for statements was lower for older adults. Age differences in source monitoring were also consistently observed in both experiments, suggesting that older adults are impaired in everyday source-monitoring tasks that involve written discourse.     

Word frequency influences on the list length effect and associative memory in young and older adults

Many studies show that age deficits in memory are smaller for information supported by pre-experimental experience. Many studies also find dissociations in memory tasks between words that occur with high and low frequencies in language, but the literature is mixed regarding the extent of word frequency effects in normal ageing. We examined whether age deficits in episodic memory could be influenced by manipulations of word frequency. In Experiment 1, young and older adults studied short and long lists of high- and low-frequency words for free recall. The list length effect (the drop in proportion recalled for longer lists) was larger in young compared to older adults and for high- compared to low-frequency words. In Experiment 2, young and older adults completed item and associative recognition memory tests with high- and low-frequency words. Age deficits were greater for associative memory than for item memory, demonstrating an age-related associative deficit. High-frequency words led to better associative memory performance whilst low-frequency words resulted in better item memory performance. In neither experiment was there any evidence for age deficits to be smaller for high- relative to low-frequency words, suggesting that word frequency effects on memory operate independently from effects due to cognitive ageing.     

Adult age differences in working memory

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether adult age differences in working memory should be attributed to less efficient processing, a smaller working memory storage capacity, or both. In Experiment 1, young, middle-age, and older adults solved three addition problems before giving the answers to any. Older adults added as well as young and middle-age adults but showed a more pronounced serial position curve across the three problem positions. In Experiment 2, young and older adults constructed linear orderings (e.g., ABCD) from pairwise information presented in sentences (e.g., BC). Manipulations involving processing (e.g., type of sentence) did not interact with age differences, but those involving storage capacity (e.g., ordering length) did. All main effects and interactions support the hypothesis of a smaller storage capacity but do not rule out some processing deficit in older adults.     

Converging evidence that visuospatial cognition is more age-sensitive than verbal cognition

In 3 separate experiments, the same samples of young and older adults were tested on verbal and visuospatial processing speed tasks, verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks, and verbal and visuospatial paired-associates learning tasks. In Experiment 1, older adults were generally slower than young adults on all speeded tasks, but age-related slowing was much more pronounced on visuospatial tasks than on verbal tasks. In Experiment 2, older adults showed smaller memory spans than young adults in general, but memory for locations showed a greater age difference than memory for letters. In Experiment 3, older adults had greater difficulty learning novel information than young adults overall, but older adults showed greater deficits learning visuospatial than verbal information. Taken together, the differential deficits observed on both speeded and unspeeded tasks strongly suggest that visuospatial cognition is generally more affected by aging than verbal cognition.     

Aging and the Ranschburg effect: no evidence of reduced response suppression in old age

Two experiments tested 1 aspect of L. Hasher and R. T. Zacks's (1988) reduced inhibition hypothesis, namely, that old age impairs the ability to suppress information in working memory that is no longer relevant. In Experiment 1, young and older adults were asked to recall lists of letters in the correct order. Half of the lists contained repeated items while half were control lists. Recall of nonadjacent repeated items was worse than that of control items. This Ramschburg effect was larger (i.e., greater response suppression) in older than in young adults. In Experiment 2, young and older adults were required either to recall the list or to report if there was a repeated item. Repetition detection was high and similar in the 2 age groups. When age differences in overall performance were taken into account, there was evidence of increased repetition inhibition with age in both experiments. Thus, contrary to the general reduced inhibition hypothesis, the specific process of response suppression during serial recall is not reduced by aging.     

Goal-directed memory: the role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory

The present study revealed that older adults recruit cognitive control processes to strengthen positive and diminish negative information in memory. In Experiment 1, older adults engaged in more elaborative processing when retrieving positive memories than they did when retrieving negative memories. In Experiment 2, older adults who did well on tasks involving cognitive control were more likely than those doing poorly to favor positive pictures in memory. In Experiment 3, older adults who were distracted during memory encoding no longer favored positive over negative pictures in their later recall, revealing that older adults use cognitive resources to implement emotional goals during encoding. In contrast, younger adults showed no signs of using cognitive control to make their memories more positive, indicating that, for them, emotion regulation goals are not chronically activated.     

Recognition and frequency judgments in young and elderly adults

Three experiments examined frequency judgments and recognition memory in young and elderly adults. Subjects were presented a long list of words at either a 5-s rate (Experiments 1 & 3) or a 1-s rate (Experiment 2), after which frequency-judgment and recognition memory tasks were administered. Either an absolute (Experiments 1 & 2) or a relative (Experiment 3) frequency-judgment task was used. The recognition test, which involved repeated tests of some items, involved either one incorrect item paired with each correct item (Experiments 1 & 2), or four incorrect items (Experiment 3). Age-related differences in frequency judgments, for the more frequently presented items, were found in all three experiments. For the recognition scores, the predicted interaction between age and successive tests was found only in Experiment 3. The results were interpreted within the framework of age-related differences in elaborative encoding and in distractibility to irrelevant stimuli.     

Aging and memory for words and action events: effects of item repetition and list length

We were concerned with the effects of item repetition, list length, and class of item on free recall in elderly as compared with young adults. In Experiment 1, samples of young and elderly adults recalled a list of 27 words and a list of 27 action events (minitasks performed by the subjects). Some items were presented once and some twice. Although the younger subjects showed better recall on both types of lists, the older sample benefited from item repetition as much as did the younger sample. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2. A second finding in Experiment 2 was a significant aging effect in the recall of long but not of short lists of both words and action events. The absence of an Age X Repetition Effect interaction was ascribed to the strength nature of the repetition manipulation. The age effects in the recall of the long lists were attributed to possible deficits in retrieval proficiency.     

Effects of Perceptual and Conceptual Processing on Memory for Words and Voice: Different Patterns for Young and Old

In two experiments younger and older adults listened to a list of words presented auditorily by two speakers. The subjects processed each word either perceptually (voice judgements) or conceptually (pleasantness judgements), and were then given memory tasks for the words and the presenting voice. In the word-recognition task the two age groups benefited equally from conceptual as opposed to perceptual processing. In the voice memory task, however, conceptual processing improved performance relative to perceptual processing in the younger subjects (significantly so in Experiment 1), but conceptual processing was associated with decreased performance in the older group (significantly so in Experiment 2). These results suggest that whereas older subjects exhibit a trade-off in memory for item and attribute information, younger subjects exhibit a pattern of support, in which conceptual processing benefits memory for both items and their attributes.     

Set-size and Frequency-of-occurrence Judgements in Young and Older Adults: The Role of the Availability Heuristic

Two experiments examined the cognitive processes underlying judgements of set size and judgements of frequency of occurrence in young (Experiments 1 and 2) and older (Experiment 2) adults. Previous research has implicated the availability heuristic in set-size judgements, whereas an automatic processing mechanism has been implicated in judgements of frequency of occurrence. In the current experiments, path analysis was employed to investigate the role of an availability bias in performance on the judgement tasks. In Experiments 1 and 2, both types of judgement were influenced by repetition frequency of words independent of the availability (recall) of specific exemplars. Experiment 2 extended the investigation to include age differences. Although older adults' recall performance was poorer overall, the availability bias was age invariant, and there were no age differences in either set-size or frequency-of-occurrence judgements. Our results indicate that both set-size and frequency-of-occurrence judgements are independent of the availability bias evident in recall, and they support the notion that an automatic processing mechanism underlies both types of judgement.     

Adult age differences in memory for distinctive information: Evidence from the bizarreness effect

Two experiments examined age-related differences in memory for bizarre and common pictures. In Experiment 1, a facilitative effect of bizarreness was obtained for young adults and one of the older groups, but not for the oldest group (over age 70). However, the bizarreness effect was found for even the oldest group when predominantly common lists were used in Experiment 2. It is concluded that older adults suffer from deficits in distinctive processing, but those deficits can be reduced by providing a more uniformly common context in which differences can be processed.